Author: Freedom Fellowship

CarePortal brings the needs of hurting children and families in your community to your attention. Child welfare workers uncover the needs. CarePortal makes local churches aware, giving them a real-time opportunity to respond.

1,472 Churches Have Already Served

21,833 Children in 14 States!

CarePortal does not have any contracts with government or child welfare agencies. The team, network, and technology required to sustain this movement is fueled by churches giving an average of $100/month. Some give more, others give less. Regardless all churches are welcome. 

To know more about CarePortal visit CarePortal.org

We use the spring Trophy Club community-wide garage sale as a fundraiser every year to help raise money to send our youth group students to youth camp and mission trip in June and July. 

We will pick up any donations you have any time you are ready, or you can bring them to Steve’s house any time you are ready.

And if you feel like helping us work the sale, come on out.  We start selling at 6:00am and usually stop selling around 3:30pm. 

The Surrendered Life

By Oswald Chambers

I have been crucified with Christ… —Galatians 2:20

To become one with Jesus Christ, a person must be willing not only to give up sin, but also to surrender his whole way of looking at things. Being born again by the Spirit of God means that we must first be willing to let go before we can grasp something else. The first thing we must surrender is all of our pretense or deceit. What our Lord wants us to present to Him is not our goodness, honesty, or our efforts to do better, but real solid sin. Actually, that is all He can take from us. And what He gives us in exchange for our sin is real solid righteousness. But we must surrender all pretense that we are anything, and give up all our claims of even being worthy of God’s consideration.

Once we have done that, the Spirit of God will show us what we need to surrender next. Along each step of this process, we will have to give up our claims to our rights to ourselves. Are we willing to surrender our grasp on all that we possess, our desires, and everything else in our lives? Are we ready to be identified with the death of Jesus Christ?

We will suffer a sharp painful disillusionment before we fully surrender. When people really see themselves as the Lord sees them, it is not the terribly offensive sins of the flesh that shock them, but the awful nature of the pride of their own hearts opposing Jesus Christ. When they see themselves in the light of the Lord, the shame, horror, and desperate conviction hit home for them.

If you are faced with the question of whether or not to surrender, make a determination to go on through the crisis, surrendering all that you have and all that you are to Him. And God will then equip you to do all that He requires of you.

Yes, but what do we mean  when  we talk of God helping us?  We
mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak. He lends us a little
of His reasoning powers and that  is how we think: He puts  a little  of His
love  into  us and that is how  we  love one another. When you teach a child
writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the
letters  because you are forming them. We love  and reason because God loves
and  reasons and holds  our hand while we  do it.  Now if we had not fallen,
that would be all plain sailing. But unfortunately we now need God’s help in
order to do  something which God, in His own  nature,  never does  at all-to
surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God’s nature corresponds
to this  process at  all.  So that the one road for  which we now need God’s
leadership most of  all is a  road God, in His own nature, has never walked.
God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not.
     But supposing God became  a  man-suppose  our  human  nature which  can
suffer and  die  was amalgamated  with God’s  nature in one person-then that
person  could help us. He could surrender  His  will, and  suffer  and  die,
because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and
I can go through this process only if  God does it in us; but  God can do it
only if He becomes  man. Our attempts at this dying  will succeed only if we
men  share in God’s dying, just as our thinking can  succeed only because it
is a drop out of  the ocean of His  intelligence: but we cannot share  God’s
dying unless God dies; and He cannot die  except by being a man. That is the
sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not
suffer at all.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, www.lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt 

If a good God made the
world why has  it gone wrong? And for many years I simply  refused to listen
to the Christian  answers  to  this  question,  because  I  kept on  feeling
“whatever you say,  and however clever your  arguments are,  isn’t  it  much
simpler  and  easier to  say that the  world was not made by any intelligent
power? Aren’t  all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to  avoid the
obvious?” But then that threw me back into another difficulty.
     My argument  against  God  was  that  the universe seemed so cruel  and
unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does  not call
a  line  crooked  unless he  has  some  idea of a straight line.  What was I
comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If  the whole show was
bad and senseless from A to Z, so  to  speak, why did I, who was supposed to
be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against  it? A man
feels  wet  when he falls into water,  because man is not a  water animal: a
fish would not feel wet.
     Of course I could have  given up my  idea of justice by  saying it  was
nothing but  a  private idea of my own. But  if I did that, then my argument
against  God collapsed too- for  the argument  depended on  saying that  the
world  was really unjust, not simply  that  it  did not happen to  please my
private fancies. Thus in the very act  of trying to  prove  that God did not
exist-in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless-I  found I was
forced to assume that one part of reality-namely my idea of justice-was full
of sense.
     Consequently atheism turns  out to be too simple. If the whole universe
has no meaning,  we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just
as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no  creatures  with
eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity        http://www.lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt

 

The excerpt below is from the book Mere Christianity by CS Lewis (pages 40-42) 

Very well then, atheism is too simple. And I will tell you another view
that is also too  simple.  It is the view I call Christianity-and-water, the
view  which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is  all
right-leaving  out all  the difficult and  terrible  doctrines about sin and
hell and the devil, and the redemption. Both these are boys’ philosophies.

     It  is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are
not simple. They  look simple, but they are not.  The table I  am sitting at
looks simple: but ask a  scientist to tell you what it is really made of-all
about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and
what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain-and, of course,
you find that what  we  call “seeing  a table” lands you  in  mysteries  and
complications  which  you can hardly  get to  the end of. A  child saying  a
child’s prayer looks simple.  And if you are content to stop there, well and
good. But if you are  not-and the modern world usually is not-if you want to
go on  and ask  what  is really  happening-  then you  must  be prepared for
something difficult. If  we ask  for something  more than simplicity,  it is
silly then to complain that the something more is not simple.
     Very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted  by people who are
not  silly,  but  who,  consciously  or   unconsciously,   want  to  destroy
Christianity. Such  people  put up a  version of Christianity suitable for a
child  of six and make that  the  object of  their  attack. When you  try to
explain the Christian doctrine as it is really held by an  instructed adult,
they then complain that you are making their heads turn round and that it is
all too  complicated  and that if there really were  a God they are sure  He
would have made “religion” simple, because simplicity  is so beautiful, etc.
You must be  on  your guard  against these people for they will change their
ground every minute and only waste your tune. Notice, too, their idea of God
“making religion simple”: as if “religion” were something  God invented, and
not His  statement to us of certain  quite unalterable facts  about His  own
nature.
     Besides  being complicated, reality, in  my experience, is usually odd.
It is not  neat,  not obvious, not what you expect. For instance,  when  you
have grasped that the earth and the other planets all  go round the sun, you
would naturally expect that all the planets were made  to match-all at equal
distances from each other, say,  or  distances that regularly increased,  or
all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go  farther from
the sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either
the sizes or  the distances; and  some of them  have one moon, one has four,
one has two, some have none, and one has a ring.
     Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That
is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not
have  guessed. If it  offered us  just  the kind  of universe we had  always
expected,  I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is  not  the
sort of thing anyone would have  made up. It has just that queer twist about
it  that  real  things  have.  So  let  us  leave  behind  all  these  boys’
philosophies-these over-simple answers. The problem is  not  simple and  the
answer is not going to be simpler either.
     What  is the  problem? A universe that contains much that  is obviously
bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like  ourselves who
know that it is bad and  meaningless. There are only two views that face all
the facts. One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone
wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The other
is  the view  called  Dualism.  Dualism means the belief that there are  two
equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and
the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight
out an endless war. I personally think that next  to Christianity Dualism is
the manliest and most sensible creed  on the market. But it  has  a catch in
it. You can read the rest online at www.lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt  
       Friends, it is time that we put simple religion behind us. When Jesus was asked, “What is the greatest commandment” part of His response was to “love God with all our mind” (Matthew 22:37-42). Mere Christianity helps us to do that. 

 

Taking the Initiative Against Despair

By Oswald Chambers

Rise, let us be going. —Matthew 26:46

In the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples went to sleep when they should have stayed awake, and once they realized what they had done it produced despair. The sense of having done something irreversible tends to make us despair. We say, “Well, it’s all over and ruined now; what’s the point in trying anymore.” If we think this kind of despair is an exception, we are mistaken. It is a very ordinary human experience. Whenever we realize we have not taken advantage of a magnificent opportunity, we are apt to sink into despair. But Jesus comes and lovingly says to us, in essence, “Sleep on now. That opportunity is lost forever and you can’t change that. But get up, and let’s go on to the next thing.” In other words, let the past sleep, but let it sleep in the sweet embrace of Christ, and let us go on into the invincible future with Him.

There will be experiences like this in each of our lives. We will have times of despair caused by real events in our lives, and we will be unable to lift ourselves out of them. The disciples, in this instance, had done a downright unthinkable thing— they had gone to sleep instead of watching with Jesus. But our Lord came to them taking the spiritual initiative against their despair and said, in effect, “Get up, and do the next thing.” If we are inspired by God, what is the next thing? It is to trust Him absolutely and to pray on the basis of His redemption.

Never let the sense of past failure defeat your next step.

 

from Oswald Chambers Utmost.org

https://utmost.org/taking-the-initiative-against-despair/

The words below are taken from Mere Christianity by CS Lewis.   

“The Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth – only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is the time we did the same about religion.

Note: “Pre-war wishful thinking” refers to the wishful thinking of Great Britain about Germany prior to WWII.  Mere Christianity is a collection of the Radio Talks of CS Lewis to the British people in 1942, 1943, and 1944.  Stay tuned for more!  

“C.S. Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way” NY Times Book Review    

 

 

Come join us for fellowship, contemporary worship and studying God’s word.

Come join us for fellowship, contemporary worship and studying God’s word.